Faust: Faust is Last (Album Review)

Two all-black CDs. A quote from Alec Empire on the booklet. A skeletal hand on the cover – Faust’s first album in a decade couldn’t look more goth if it tried. Happily, this is the Krautrock pioneers as we know and love them.

If disc two is slightly redundant (‘Karneval’, in particular, rambles on for over seven minutes without going anywhere much), disc one is fantastic; a noisy, dissonant and occasionally beautiful gesamtkunstwerk that captures Faust in all their guises, from the unsettling Mt Zion strings of ‘Nachtfahrt’ to ‘Hit Me’, with its raucous, fuzzed up garage rock. A weird and welcome return.